Aristocrats (2 page)
To the south and east of Richmond House a lawn sloped down to a balustraded terrace which looked over London’s busiest street, the River Thames. On a fine day the occupants of the house could sit on sheltered benches, watch the sun coming up beyond the dome of St Paul’s Cathedral, and follow its progress across the river to the slums of Southwark, round past the pavilions and long walks of Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens and see it sink in the west behind the villages of Richmond and Kew.
The Thames carried people and goods up and down and from side to side. Travellers from all over the world, after disembarking down river, continued upstream in smaller boats. From London Basin, where large merchantmen moored, lightermen in skiffs and barges brought the city supplies: flour and grain from East Anglia, fish from the North Sea, wine and cognac from France, fine wool from Spain, silk from China, carpets from Turkey and timber and spices from Madagascar and the East Indies. Occasionally the lighterman brought more durable plunder: paintings from Italy and The Netherlands and crate-loads of Roman statues, some lacking arms, some heads, some legs, that were reassembled and displayed in the halls and libraries of the rich. Snug in their niches, these remade senators and muses guarded public policy and private pleasures, lending the dignity of antiquity to political squabbles and experiments with electromagnetism alike.
Boats also brought more mundane things: wax and tallow to light the houses of London, stone to build them and coal to heat them. The coal barges, disgorging their dusty contents into basements along the riverbank, were of particular importance to Caroline Lennox and her father. For it was in coal
that the Richmond family fortunes lay, and it was due to the huge expansion of the coal trade in the eighteenth century that Caroline’s father was a man of such immense wealth.
Caroline’s grandfather, the first Duke of Richmond, was born in 1672. He was the youngest of Charles II’s many illegitimate sons. His mother, Caroline’s great-grandmother, was Louise de Kéroualle who, as a young woman of twenty, was sent over to England with Louis XIV’s courtiers and diplomats conducting the negotiations for what became the secret and notorious Treaty of Dover. Louise ousted Charles’s reigning mistress and, over the years did the King, her country and herself stout service. The Treaty, signed in 1670, bound England and France to peaceful coexistence and held till the revolution of 1688 brought William of Orange to the English throne. Louise was created Duchess of Portsmouth by Charles II. Louis XIV, for his part, recognised her service to his country by granting her the Stuart family lands in France. With the land came two châteaux, Aubigny and La Verrerie. Louise eventually retired to Aubigny and Caroline visited her there in the late 1720s.
In return for royal largesse, Louise gave Charles years of service in the bedchamber and a son, Caroline’s grandfather, named Charles Lennox. During his boyhood the child was given a plethora of titles to cover his bastardy. He was created Duke of Richmond, Baron of Settrington and Earl of March in the English peerage, and Baron Methuen of Tarbolton, Earl of Darnley and Duke of Lennox in the Scottish peerage. When his mother died he added the title of Duc d’Aubigny to this list and did homage for it to the French crown.
To this sonorous but worthless panoply Charles II added something more substantial: an annuity of two thousand pounds and a royalty of twelvepence per chauldron on coal dues at Newcastle. In effect the young Duke was given a substantial slice of the crown’s tax revenue, which increased in direct proportion to mining and manufacturing.
As manufacturing increased, so did the number of laden barges leaving the Tyne and the wealth of the Dukes of Richmond. At the beginning of the eighteenth century the coal dues already produced five thousand pounds a year, a sum on which an aristocrat, his family, servants and horses could all live in style. By the 1790s the amount had shot up to over twenty thousand pounds annually, prompting the radical Tom Paine to remark ‘the Duke of Richmond takes away as much for himself as would maintain two thousand poor and aged persons’. Little of this wealth would come down to Caroline, of course. It was mostly reserved for the male heir, for the continuation of the family line and maintenance of the family properties. But in her childhood Caroline basked in the warm glow of the coal money. She was painted, pampered, richly clothed and well fed. If her own share of the family’s dividend from Newcastle, her dowry, was relatively modest, it was backed up by an immense family fortune and enhanced by a great name. With ten thousand pounds and the Lennox name and connections, Caroline was well endowed for the only career open to a woman of her class – marriage into a noble and wealthy family and a job at Court.
When Charles II died in 1685, Louise de Kéroualle took her son back to her château at Aubigny and brought him up as a Catholic and a Frenchman. Duke of Richmond as he was, Charles Lennox was always a Frenchman first and an Englishman second. As a young man he served with the French army against the Prince of Orange. But, like his mother, Richmond had an eye for the main chance. Realising that his titles, his annuity and his coal dues would make him a man of far greater influence and consequence than his French army pay, he renounced his religion (consoling himself with the mysteries of Freemasonry instead), and came to England.
Richmond successfully petitioned William III for his titles, income and property, becoming, by way of payment, a
Staunch Anglican, a Whig and a supporter of the Hanoverian succession. His children and grandchildren became English subjects and courtiers in their turn. Once he had regained his property and revenues, Caroline’s grandfather began to look around for a job at Court and a military commission. But he was conspicuously unsuccessful, partly because he was a newcomer tainted with Frenchness and partly because he was better at holding his drink than any steady employment. So he spent much of his time hunting in Sussex, where he eventually bought the country estate of Goodwood near Chichester, and gambling in London and on the Continent. He was cosmopolitan, charming and feckless, equally at home in Paris and in London. His sense of belonging in France was inherited by his children and grandchildren who always felt that the social and sexual casualness of French aristocratic life chimed better with the family’s easy-going informality than the hectic mixture of restraint and intrigue that characterised the English court.
The Lennox children were almost bilingual and read French as easily as English. In Caroline’s library and in those of her sisters, French books took up almost as much room as English ones. French was the language of philosophers and the language of romance. Cheap novels, or ‘story books’, as Caroline called them, books too ephemeral to merit binding and shelving in the library, were very often imported from Paris and stacked in Caroline’s dressing-room, and in them, romantic heroines, faced with moral and marital dilemmas, whispered, schemed and (usually) capitulated in the language of love and dalliance. So, for Caroline, dropping into French at amorous or difficult moments had both literary and family sanction.
On his trips to London and to Europe, Caroline’s grandfather put off boredom with long bouts of gambling, playing for large stakes with British officers and courtiers who thronged London and the Low Countries during the wars with Louis XIV. In The Hague in 1719, Richmond racked up
a large debt to the Irish Earl of Cadogan, one of Marlborough’s staff officers and confidants. To pay him off and to seal his friendship, Richmond gave his heir, the Earl of March, as husband for Cadogan’s daughter Sarah, accepting a reduction of five thousand pounds in her marriage settlement to make up the difference. The wedding, as Caroline’s father was later fond of telling her and her siblings, was very quickly arranged. He was eighteen years old and about to embark on the Grand Tour. His bride to be was only thirteen. They were brought together and told by their fathers that they were going to be married straight away. The little girl was speechless but the horrified young man burst out, ‘surely they are not going to marry me to that dowdy!’ After this fruitless objection the ceremony was performed. When it was over, the Earl of March, accompanied by his tutor, set off for Italy. His wife went back to the nursery. Thus, in an extreme form, Caroline’s parents acted out the powerlessness of aristocratic children, who could become pawns in a parental chess game, who were sacrificed for family alliances or sold for money and prestige.
When he grew up, Caroline’s father developed a taste for practical jokes, and came to see his marriage as one of them. He loved to tell its story to his children because it ended happily. When he returned from his continental travels three years later, the Earl was very reluctant to call on and claim his wife. He went to the theatre instead. Like many of those present, he was more occupied in looking at the boxes and stalls than the stage. Noticing one particularly sumptuous young woman, he turned to his neighbour and asked who she was. ‘You must be a stranger in London,’ came the reply, ‘not to know the toast of the town, the beautiful Lady March.’
It was a dénouement as sentimental as Caroline’s father could have wished, and he followed it with a well publicised happy marriage. He was never ashamed to demonstrate, in portraits, letters and drawing-rooms his love for his wife and children. Horace Walpole, a voluptuary of gossip who for
nearly half a century recorded the scandals of the Whig circle in which the Lennoxes moved, noticed his familial content. At a ball given by a family friend in November 1741, Walpole reported that Caroline’s father sat by her mother all night, ‘kissing her hand and gazing at his beautiful daughters’. The Duchess returned her husband’s feelings. After a quarrel in September 1740 she wrote to him, ‘of all the time that I have loved you, I never felt more love and tenderness for you than I did yesterday. I haunted all the places where you had been last. One was to go among your trees where you stood so long on Sunday … and as much as I love you I hate myself.’
The second Duke of Richmond’s marriage was the most dramatic event of his life. It was involuntarily undertaken, done to him rather than by him, and in it lay the seeds of Caroline’s own fascination with the institution of marriage itself. Caroline inherited a good deal of the first Duke of Richmond’s recklessness, although it was overlaid with her father’s prudence and carefulness, and she believed that love and impulsiveness went together. She championed marriages for love, but at the same time she knew that, although her parents’ marriage had been at best a matter of convenience, at worst a cynical sacrifice of youth to pleasure, it was a marriage that worked. She could neither condone nor condemn arranged marriages, and since that was what her parents wanted for her, she solved her dilemma first by remaining unmarried for much longer than most girls and then by making a spectacular choice that flouted her parents’ wishes.
After his own marriage Caroline’s father continued to take what life had to offer with gratitude and restraint, seeing no reason to become a man who seized the initiative. As a result his career was dignified rather than spectacular. After the accession of George II, the Duke was appointed a Lord of the Bedchamber, while Caroline’s mother became Lady of the Bedchamber to Queen Caroline. Once ensconced in his post, Caroline’s father pursued his earnest desire to erase any lingering traces of wild roistering, whoring and gambling
from his family’s reputation. He was a model grandson to Louise de Kéroualle, soaking up without complaint the emotion and expectation she diverted on to him from her unsatisfactory son. When the first Duke died in 1723, Louise shed what she described as ‘very bitter’ tears. After all, she told the new Duke, it was her son that she had lost. But she recovered quickly, and added that she would survive her bereavement because she knew her grandson loved her. ‘I dare flatter myself, my dear boy, that you have a sincere tenderness and affection for a grandmother who has the most lifelong devotion to you; and I shall not consider myself so unhappy, my dear Lord, if you are just a little bit sensible of it.’ She felt that to make an adequate demonstration of his love, the second Duke should produce an heir. The Richmond line needed securing and, besides, she said, she wanted another portrait to hang in her château alongside the previous Ducs d’Aubigny. She was pleased enough with the birth of Caroline in 1723, but disappointed with the Duchess of Richmond a year later. Sarah’s second child, a boy, lived only a few hours. Louise wrote and, in a perfunctory way, thanked God that Sarah hadn’t died too. But, she went on relentlessly, ‘She has not kept her promise to me though. For in her last letter she promised me a son, but – the dear child – I’m sure she is very sorry to have failed in her promise! But I hope that her third will be an increase of the right sort in your family.’
The Duke and Duchess worked tirelessly to gratify this hard taskmistress. They had twelve children, seven of whom lived to maturity. After Caroline’s birth in 1723 came Emily, in 1731. Charles, who eventually became the third Duke, was born in 1735, too late for Louise de Kéroualle, who battled on in hopes until she was eighty-nine, but had finally died a year before. George, in homage to the King, arrived in 1737, then Louisa in 1743, Sarah in 1745 and Cecilia in 1750.
Throughout her childhood Caroline was continually hustled from place to place as the Court moved about, disbanded and re-formed. If the King was at St James’s, the
Lennox family could live in the comfort of Richmond House a mile or so away. But if the King moved to Kensington, Hampton Court or Windsor the whole Lennox family went too. Each move of the Court was like an army decamping: the crush and chaos of wagons piled high with family furniture, silver and clothes chests; the barking of dogs, neighing of horses, crying of children and shouting of courtiers and servants; the noisy rumble through the streets; the undignified scramble for the best lodgings at the other end.
During the social and parliamentary season when the Court was assembled, Caroline might not see her parents for days on end. She lived in their lodgings, chattering in French to her nanny and later doing her lessons with her French governess, while her parents went to work. Caroline’s mother waited on the Queen, carrying out tasks whose humbleness was barely mitigated by her salary of £500 a year or the dignity of her office. She ordered meals and clothes, dispatched servants to fetch books, cards, prints, workbags or pastimes, and rationed visitors. Caroline’s father performed similar jobs for the King. In compensation for the dullness of their days, Lords and Ladies of the Bedchamber were the monarchs’ companions and perhaps their friends.